Rental Car for Ireland Trip

There is absolutely no reason to have a car in Dublin. I'd return it to the airport then take the express bus into Dublin city center.

Couple things...

If all you are planning is just to drive from Cork to Dublin, I'd drop the car in Cork and just take the train to Dublin. If you have a complex plan with multiple stops between Cork and Dublin, check to see if those locations are served by train. That part of Ireland doesn't necessarily need a car. The southwest and west coast, yes, a car is super handy there, but between Cork and Dublin, not so much. Likewise between Galway and Dublin - if your plan is to pick up the car in Cork, drive around the southwest and west, wrapping up in Galway, then drop the car there and train or bus back to Dublin.

No downsides that I'm aware of to using the car coverage provided by your card. I did and it was smooth as silk. There's a lot of ongoing misinformation and disinformation (including some here) warning that the auto insurance provided by credit cards is not valid in Ireland (that's nonsense) or that you're going to have to mud-wrestle with the car rental agency staff to avoid having to buy their insurance (also nonsense, at least in my experience - you decline all the non-mandatory insurance offered by the agency, they should be fine with that; they may not like it - they have boat payments to make and would rather buy a round at the pub - but all you have to do is politely decline, be ready to show the letter from the card company's insurance division that clearly says you have coverage, and that's the end of the discussion, no drama, no worries). Do read and understand your policy (before you go), as you should anytime you are renting a car. Any rental agency should be OK with this (if they're not, there are plenty of others you could choose). I had zero pushback. But you will still read lots of dire warnings. 100% non-issues IME.

Of course, drive carefully, and have your left-seat passenger act as your full-time co-pilot, navigator, helper and support person. Make sure you both take that job seriously - deadly seriously (like, as serious as a head-on collision with a combined velocity of 100+ mph, which is one of the possible alternatives if you don't keep it together). Keep calm and carry on, and have fun. Ireland is wonderful.

.. I probably should have clarified that we are flying into Dublin, taking the bus to Cork. Spending two nights in Cork and the headed to the southwest making our way over several days to Clifden. Then back to Dublin for two nights before flying home. Would it be better to drop the car in Galway and train back to Dublin??

Yes—picking up the rental in Cork and dropping it off in Galway is a good plan. You can do it through www.AutoEurope.com which brokers car rentals for the big car rental agencies and will let you do just that,
Have a great trip!

Just to clarify the card insurance thing, "premium" cards usually include insurance everywhere. Other cards specifically spell out in their T&Cs that Ireland is excluded from coverage. The rental clerk will often demand proof in writing, and the card folks are used to providing proof of coverage via a personalized email document. I have two Citi issued cards, a Costco Visa and an AT&T Mastercard. The former covers Ireland and the latter does not.

I wouldn't pick up the car till leaving Cork unless your lodging has parking.

I don't think you need to go to the airport to pick up the car. You should be able to pick it up at the train station, which is not in the immediate center of the city, but it's not far.

reasonable to pick up the car at the Cork training station in the city centre? Not too crazy driving out of the city from there (this is the morning we are checking out to drive to the southwest)?

I'll grant you that the train station is in the northeast section of the city, meaning you would have to drive on some city streets to get out of town. Meanwhile, the airport is out of town, to the southwest, so you wouldn't have to drive on city streets at all (in Cork, anyway). Cork isn't a big city like Dublin. I can see two routes out of town that don't pass through the city's core (and one that does). Depending on where you're staying, you can probably walk to the train station, whereas you need a taxi (or a bus, I guess) to the airport. There are other car rental agencies in other parts of the city, as well. I would run a search on autoeurope.com with all Cork pickup locations and see what offers you get. Maybe picking up at the airport will save you the cost of the taxi.

I just ran a search on autoeurope.com, and the only result I got was for Enterprise, which has three pickup locations. This may be due to the drop-off in Galway.

A (perhaps) surprising detail you might want to check: Your options for rental agency locations will vary depending on what day of the week and the hour you specify.

We picked up our rented car in Galway, drove it all around the west and southwest, then were headed back to Dublin. I had a bit of trouble finding a drop-off location in southwest Ireland...because i wanted to return the car on a Sunday morning.

If I had wanted to drop the car off at 1 pm on a Tuesday - lots of options. At 10 am on a Sunday, not so much. I had not considered that when making my high-level plans for our itinerary, it only popped up after I had made some other hard-to-adjust plans and I had moved down to the finer details of car rental timing.

Turns out a lot of rental agencies (especially in smaller cities and towns) are closed on Sunday mornings (I guess employees are in church or sleeping off Saturday night's pub activities, or just having a nice relaxing brekky with the family). I was looking for a drop-off location whose office was open on Sunday before noon and which was a short taxi-ride away from a railway station (we wanted to drop the car and take the train to Dublin). For us, the only agency in a large part of southwest Ireland that met our criteria was the desk at Cork airport. Dropoff there was easy enough, we grabbed a taxi to the Cork train station (taxi was cheap and easy).

Just something to consider - more likely to be an issue specifically on a Sunday morning in a small town, less of an issue on "business days", in bigger cities, at airports, etc.

Other than airport rental agencies, pick up and drop off of rental cars on Sundays can be tricky anywhere in the UK and Ireland. Outside of the US, many places don’t operate 24/7. Sundays are meant as a day off. Shut down for a siesta is still normal in many places in Europe.

In smaller towns there may be little or no service on Saturday too for car rentals such as only operate Saturday morning. For example, on Saturday the Isle of Man airport car rental is open 8:30 to 1 and 5:30 to 9 even though flight from London arrives at 4 (that is Avis).